audio and video of indigenous languages from various tribes

Massive Digital Divide for Native Americans is ‘A Travesty’

Perhaps nowhere in the United States does the digital divide cut as wide as in Indian Country. More than 90 percent of tribal populations lack high-speed Internet access, and usage rates are as low as 5 percent in some areas, according to the Federal Communications Commission.

“You have a community that perhaps treasures media and cultural production more than almost any other constituency in the country, and you have an entire dearth of access to new media production and dissemination technology,” Meinrath said.

Since 2009, New America Foundation has worked with Native Public Media, which supports and advocates for Native American media outlets, to help tribal communities take advantage of new media platforms. In January, the organizations formalized their partnership, and this fall, they plan to launch a media literacy pilot project that will train Native radio broadcasters in at least four communities to tell stories using digital tools.

“It’s a very proactive way to address the digital divide, apart from the hardware,” said Loris Ann Taylor, president of Native Public Media. (read the full article here » )

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Endangered Language Fund
ELF was founded ten years ago with the goal of supporting endangered language preservation and documentation projects. Our main mechanism for supporting work on endangered languages has been funding grants to individuals, tribes, and museums.
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Indigenous Language Institute
The Indigenous Language Institute provides vital language related services to Native communities so that their individual identities, traditional wisdom and values are passed on to future generations in their original languages.
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The Longnow Foundation's Rosetta Project
The Rosetta Project is The Long Now Foundation’s first exploration into very long-term archiving. It serves as a means to focus attention on the problem of digital obsolescence, and ways we might address that problem through creative archival storage meth
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The Rosetta Stone native language project
The Rosetta Stone Endangered Language Program works with native groups to customize Rosetta Stone software for exclusive use in language revitalization. Each revitalization project builds on the company’s mission to help people improve their lives and mak
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